Predatory publishers are already damaging the Open Access reputation. Unfortunately, the uncontrolled proliferation of new Open Access journals is also negatively impacting on the standing of the Open Access movement.

From the list of 3,850 Open Access journals currently indexed by JournalTOCs, we detect that in average two of those Open Access journals cease publishing or disappear altogether every month. In addition, we noticed that various Open Access journals indexed by JournalTOCs are struggling to continue publishing new issues. The temptation for some of those journals to publish “anything” is real.

The questions we would like to ask to our friends at DOAJ are:1. How many of the Open Access journals, registered with DOAJ, have ceased to publish? 2. Can DOAJ provide us with an API to help us to detect the OA journals that no longer exist?

In average, JournalTOCs receives 10 requests per day to add new Open Access journals to its database. In most of the cases, those journals do not meet our selection criteria and consequently they are not added to JournalTOCs.

Open Access journals are helping researchers to boost their number of publications and citations. For example Prof. Syed Tauseef Mohyud-Din has achieved an impressive number of 350 new papers published in less than four years. However, aren’t we abusing the current explosion of spurious scholarly Open Access journals? Is the peer-review model working in the same way for both Open Access and commercial “traditional” publishers? Many questions are still to be answered regarding Open Access.